General Admission (Seated w/ Standing / Dancing) - Doors at 7PM
$35 Advance, $40 Day of Show

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https://www.either-orchestra.org/

Éthiopiques started as a reissue series launched in 1997 by French producer Francis Falceto, and grew into something much bigger: the global rediscovery of Ethiopia’s “Swinging Addis” era of the late 1960s and early ’70s. The music’s roots go back to 1924, when the future Emperor Haile Selassie heard a brass band of 40 Armenian orphans in Jerusalem and brought them to Addis Ababa as the imperial band. Their bandmaster, Kevork Nalbandian, and later his nephew Nerses, were instrumental in making brass and Western instrumentation the backbone of modern Ethiopian music. By the ’60s, Addis Ababa’s nightclubs and record labels were producing a remarkable fusion of Ethiopian modal scales (qenet), Amharic vocal ornamentation, American soul and funk, big-band brass and jazz.

In 1974, the Derg revolution brought it all crashing down. Curfews, censorship and exile shut the scene down almost overnight, and the recordings were nearly lost to the outside world until Falceto brought them back across 30+ volumes on the Paris label Buda Musique.

Today you can hear Éthiopiques everywhere: in hip-hop samples, film soundtracks, and the phrasings and arrangements of groups like the Budos Band and Khruangbin. It relaunched the careers of exiled musicians, like Hailu Mergia, who worked as a taxi driver in DC for decades until the reissues brought him back to notoriety.

Éthiopiques is a reference point for how archival reissues can rewrite a country’s place in music history. It’s a triumphant story, and its most influential North American collaborators, the Either/Orchestra, have played an important hand in it. They’re the only non-Ethiopian group featured in the series, and they’ve been featured twice. On volume 32, the 10-piece orchestra plays the music of Nerses Nalbandian, the Armenian-Ethiopian who did so much to modernize his adopted country’s music.

Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1985 by saxophonist and composer Russ Gershon, the ten-piece Either/Orchestra has carved out a singular place in jazz history with its adventurous blend of tradition, experimentation, and global collaboration. Drawing equally from bebop, avant-garde, and punk DIY spirit, the ensemble has served as a proving ground for future stars like John Medeski, Matt Wilson, Miguel Zenón, and Jaleel Shaw, while releasing acclaimed albums including the Grammy-nominated Calculus of Pleasure.

In the mid-1990s, the E/O began exploring the rich sound world of Ethiopian music, leading to transformative collaborations with Ethiojazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke, saxophone legend Getachew Mekurya, and vocalists Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete. Their landmark recording éthiopiques 20: Live in Addis made them the only American band included in the celebrated series. Then in 2025, the group released éthiopiques 32, reviving the Armenian-Ethiopian composer Nerses Nalbandian, a seminal inspiration for the ethio jazz movement. They've recently performed at Winter Jazzfest and Big Ears, bringing next-gen Ethiopian singers Munit Mesfin and Bruck Tesfaye on stage with them.